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Statistical Analysis of Copyright Registrations
linuxizer writes "I've been poking around in Penn's Library for most of my Freshman year, looking up copyright statistics. What I found is basically what many suspected all along: extending and strengthening copyright terms has little effect on actual innovation. Perhaps most fascinating is the strong 40-year upward trend in registrations which is sharply broken in 1991 with a precipitous decline. Also included are some interesting observations about the RIAA's data. The numerous graphics should be well-enough explained that you don't need to go to the data files, but they are included if needed."
Perhaps most fascinating is the strong 40-year upward trend in registrations which is sharply broken in 1991 with a precipitous decline.
Isn't that about the time that the US copyright law changed so that you no longer had to register to claim copyright? I thught it was some time around the late 80's.
So the premise remains valid. The conclusion is pretty clear as well, as seen from the decades following the passage of the 1909 and 1976 laws: the drastic expansions of copyright had little to do with increasing innovation in this country.
Like the study says, this is good grounds to stop extending copyrights as extending them would only serve to give incentive to innovate through prolonging the period of returns on said innovation. If this becomes widely accepted then it's just a matter of arguing copy rights are too long, (or too short?) as to provide enough incentive to innovate.
Note that the conclusions (and in the entire study) says nothing about copy right extensions slowing innovation.
I really would like to see some analysis on the negative effects (if at all) of copyright extensions on innovation.
Playing devil's advocate, if copyright extensions have no effect, then the Bad Guys can say,
"Let's extend copyrights forever, so that people can never gain from other people's ideas. This is legitimate, since extending doesn't affect the number of copyright registrations... innovation is not hindered by copyright extensions!"
We all need to ask ourselves how much is the public domain worth anyway?
The answer is A LOT. Our artists and culture are suffering.
-- Have you read 1984?
Since 1997, clicking this link is a Jail-able offense in the US.
All jokes about the wasting of his freshman year, and the innumerable popups (Long Live Mozilla!) aside, this was a rather interesting article.
I'd like to have seen the copyright numbers graphed next to some population numbers to see how they compare. Do the number of copyrights registered in the US correlate with the number of people in the US?
Also, the number of copyrights seems to follow a fairly linear trend until 1950, and then it suddenly becomes quadratic until 1991. Why? Was there some huge up-swing in population growth at that point, or something? (The baby-boomers wouldn't have started registering copyrighted works until much later, would they?) Did everyone suddenly discover acid and become that much more creative?
Ian
Yes, I know it fits in great with the Slashdot party line, but did anyone actually *read* this article and look at the graphs he presents ?
.99 ??The graph only fits in part of the graph. I can't even believe whoever was advising this dufus would suggest he TRY to fit a quadratic, since the graph he shows is clearly not suitable for a quadratic.
In one graph, he attempts to show a dramatic "reversal" in the number of copyright registrations by year, fitting a quadratic. Did anyone LOOK at the quadratic he fit ? If so, how could any such person not question his claim of an R-squared >
As for the "reversal" he sees in the last few years, it is questionable what his extrapolation from 4 decades and "finding" a subsequent dip in registrations really means - he certainly doesn't present the statistics to convince ME there's a dip, and I bet if you dropped the points from around 88-91 you'd get just as good a fit to the 1950-2003 data. That is, he has some sort of dubious fit, and he's concluding there's something deep and meaningful about the dislocation of the last 10 or so points, without question whether maybe 4 or so points that mark the supposed reversal are really themselves what is dislocated.
Then there's the myriad graphs entitled "Bivariate fit of X" and "Bivariate fit of Y", in many cases he just connected the dots. Yes, "bivariate fit" adds an air of authenticity, to everyone that is except someone who knows the slightest bit of statistics.
The whole "article" is covered with "just-so" stories, anecdotes, and supposition about what might or might not be. Where's the rigorous statistical analysis ? You can't make a statistical argument by showing graphs.
I just don't trust statistical arguments made by a guy who doesn't seem like he knows what he's talking about.
extending and strengthening copyright terms has little effect on actual innovation. Perhaps most fascinating is the strong 40-year upward trend in registrations which is sharply broken in 1991 with a precipitous decline.
Does that precipitous decline correlate with copyright extensions. Were you being sarcastic when you said extending and strengthening copyright terms has little effect on actual innovation. What am I missing here?
So the author wanted to find out why copyright registrations declined after 1991? Well, there was a big depression shortly after that time. The article's author was pointing out how the Great Depression and the different major wars of the last century negatively affected copyright registrations, so it makes sense. I know he/she was probably 8-10 yrs. old in the early 90's so maybe he/she never really grasped how bad times were. And look! registrations start rebounding around '95-96 when IT started taking off.
Since the page in question doesn't really come to a tidy conclusion, this is what I extracted from his "pretty data":
* Around 1991, the overall number of copyright registrations plummeted compared to what the data would predict.
* The number of musical compositions experienced a similar plunge, implying that fewer musical compositions led to fewer copyright registrations.
* During those years, the RIAA continued to ship certain CDs in proportion to their price, in keeping with the law of supply and demand.
* Probable conclusion: The RIAA's current financial woes are due to nothing more than an abrupt reduction in the number of recordings released.
Of course, IANAS. Did I miss anything?
A friend of mine and I had this discussion about inventions and patents and copyrights a while ago, and we came to the shocking conclusion that there has been no innovation in the past 50 years except for the Internet. (And since this conversation was probably in 1995, it wasn't even that big then)
Now we defined our innnovation rather strictly, saying that it had to be both important and not simply an add on to a previous invention. So, for example, the invention of the jet (which was still before 1950) wouldn't count because it was simply a modification on the plane. Try and think of any real technological advances in the past 50 years under this description and you'll either find that most innovations are a) a fad and not important, or b) just an add on to someone elses work.
Keep in mind that in America, most people do not take a year off after high school to travel around the world and get drunk and laid. College is the only chance most Americans get to do this. Once they're out of college, they are expected to get married, get a house, and work themselves to death.
Most Europeans I know took at least a year to do the hostel circuit or work in ski resorts before continuing on to college.